Old Skin, New Features

Version 3 of Red Hat’s free community-supported Fedora Core distribution will be available by the time you read this article.On the surface, very little has changed,but under the hood,Core 3 has innovations designed to improve the user experience.We investigated the final release candidate,and here’s what we found.

Many Linux users are skeptical when they hear about Fedora. The Fedora [1] distribution is based on tried and trusted Red Hat technology, but the name gives users no indication of this history. Red Hat officially handed over development of the end user version to the free software community some time ago. But this has not prevented Red Hat developers from contributing to the more critical components of the distribution. The experience they gain developing Fedora is then fed back into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Update or New Install We used Yum to update a running Fedora Core 2 to Core 3 Release Candidate 5 in our lab. The update referred to here worked without any major difficulties; there were a few dependencies that needed some attention, but they were related to non-Fedora packets. And a fresh install using a DVD we had burnt in our lab worked perfectly. Updating to the final release will work in exactly the same way.